Chicago – February 27, 2025
The Trump administration has partially lifted a hold that had frozen ability of the National Institutes of Health to review new grant applications for research into diseases ranging from heart disease and COVID to Alzheimer’s and allergies.
The freeze occurred because the Trump administration had blocked the NIH from posting any new notices in the Federal Register, which is required before many federal meetings can be held. The stoppage forced the agency to cancel meetings to review thousands of grant applications.
The meeting freeze had stalled about 16,000 grant applications vying for around $1.5 billion in NIH funding, according to one person who is familiar with the grant-making process who did not want to be identified because of fear of retribution.
But on Wednesday the NIH released a statement saying the agency could now “begin sending notices incrementally to the Office of the Federal Register to advertise meetings of scientific review groups/study sections and begin their resumption.”
